Road Assessment in an Amalgamated Municipality

The City of Temiskaming Shores is a picturesque community in Northern Ontario, Canada, offering ideal boating, hiking, skiing, snowmobiling and golfing and an exceptional place to both live and work. The recently amalgamated municipality with a population of 11,000 needed a cost-effective method to assess and repair its 114 km road infrastructure for citizens and visitors.

The Challenge

Whenever a Municipality goes through the process of amalgamating, (in this case, three former towns amalgamated) the final entity absorbs varying asset management practices and platforms, challenging the decision-making process for all departments involved. The City needed a fast, objective, and transparent way to assess roadway conditions and determine which roads needed repair, along with how and in what order they needed to be repaired. In addition to managing road maintenance, the City needed up-to-date records of its pavement markings and pedestrian facilities database. 

The Partner 

StreetScan, through an innovative Roads & Sidewalk Assessment Service developed by Local Authority Services, (LAS) provides a fast and affordable pavement, sidewalk & right-of-way asset management service that can be deployed citywide on a frequent basis. StreetScan uses vehicle-mounted sensing technology to assess road & sidewalk conditions in normal traffic flow and displays gathered information in a geographic information system (GIS) application StreetLogix: a web app with up-to-date data and a range of tools for decision-making.

The Solution 

StreetScan’s mobile-sensing vehicle, ScanVan, is the physical heart of the asset management system, assessing pavements, traffic signs, pavement markings and more on every road it traverses. The ScanVan travelled Temiskaming Shores roads in normal traffic flow to gather data on the condition of the entire street network utilizing 3D imaging technology to measure road defects. Multiple optical camera systems provide imagery of the road surface and ROW to extract the additional asset features the City required to complete their asset management needs. Once scanned, a variety of technologies from StreetScan & Esri, such as ArcPy scripts, ArcGIS Desktop, and ArcGIS enterprise were leveraged to generate Streetlogix, a GIS web app with powerful visualization and budget-planning tools. This app provides road condition ratings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being the worst and 100 being ideal, and prioritizes the areas to repair and remediate.

The Results 

Using Streetlogix, the City can now see an enriched view of its street network with color-coded pavement conditions and other assets, along with images for every road along with tools for data-driven budget and maintenance planning. StreetScan reported that Temiskaming Shores’ overall pavement condition index (PCI) was rated in ‘good’ condition at an average PCI of 70, with 91.2% of roads above critical PCI of 55. Only 8.8% of roads were rated as ‘very poor’ or ‘poor’. All of this was made possible via a unique funding program called the Municipal Asset Management Program (MAMP) by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM). LAS & StreetScan assisted the City in obtaining funding for roughly 80% of the project cost allowing the City to further strengthen its Asset Management database.

“Using StreetScan has saved us significant work assessing our transportation infrastructures. Our confidence in StreetScan’s results has led us to make our largest financial investment in road improvements in years.”
Doug Walsh
DPW, City of Temiskaming Shores